Governments and private sector organizations are looking to optimize operations as they expand their footprints. New technologies are now enabling cost efficiencies in IT infrastructure installations like never before. Equally significantly, several new technology innovations are now helping us re-imagine efficiencies and optimization in general infrastructure and services. The greatest impact of this is visible in the area of smart cities, where IT is transforming the delivery of public services and management of energy and utilities.

The pursuit of improved operational efficiency, cost savings, and business value is one of the key objectives of IT investment for organizations. The technology systems within organizations, and the management thereof, have become highly complex due to rapid increases in the number of resources that need to be supported, particularly by the datacenter. Since the existing traditional architectures lead to inherent inefficiencies in resource utilization and management, organizations are increasingly looking to adopt technologies such as virtualization, cloud, converged infrastructure, datacenter management software and integrated offerings to meet the increasing demands on IT from the business. However, IT budgets are not keeping pace with this growth in demand, and IT managers are being asked to improve the utilization of existing assets, optimize new deployments, and demonstrate ROI. In addition, improving the efficiency of urban infrastructure is essential to becoming a smarter city. Urban efficiency will deliver better public services, increase city attractiveness, drive its sustainability objectives and enhance its competitiveness on the regional or global stage.

Join us at this exclusive Middle East Datacenter Power to the Cloud conference. IT executives from across the region and leading industry analysts will discuss emerging technology paradigms and platforms that will make a real contribution to long-term IT infrastructure strategies. They will also assess the common opportunities and challenges that organizations are facing, and dissect the best practices of leading global and regional government and private entities. Learn lessons from Schneider Electric’s 200+ smart city engagements across the world, highlighting the collaborative business model that supports such a massive transformation as well as the simple steps in the roadmap to urban sustainability.

KEY TOPICS ADDRESSED

New IT Models: Driving Business Agility and Innovation

Ricardo Barros , Schneider Electric

New technologies and models such as virtualization and cloud are increasingly driving the CIO agenda in the Middle East. The datacenter is at the center of this transformation. Rapid increase in the number of devices, applications and data is mounting pressure on the datacenter. Ensuring high availability, reliability and agility is becoming key to IT success. This session will discuss approaches to building and optimizing a datacenter infrastructure that can cater to the future IT needs which is a significant challenge for the modern CIO.

Tuning Datacenter Infrastructure for the Cloud

Paul Francois Cattier, Schneider Electric

IT virtualization has greatly increased the ability to utilize and scale compute power. Virtualization has become the transformative platform that underpins cloud computing. While the benefits of this technology and service delivery model are well known, understood, and increasingly being taken advantage of, their effects on the datacenter physical infrastructure are less understood. Optimizing power, cooling and infrastructure management can help to maximize the benefits of virtualization and cloud. This session will attempt to describe these effects while offering possible solutions or methods for dealing with them.

Emerging focus on "Green IT": Datacenter strategies and challenges

Anna Conan, Schneider Electric

Increasingly, CIOs are becoming sensitive to environmental sustainability. IT requirements for datacenters are escalating, but that growth is now stretching the capacity of current facilities, such as space and power. Organizations are now embracing the “green” trend, partly due to increasing realisation of the cost benefits of more efficient facilities, and at least partly due to anticipation that governments will eventually implement stricter guidelines for datacenter operations. This session will discuss the emergence of green datacenters and the constituents that comprise them.

Soeren Juul Schroeder, Schneider Electric

As emerging technologies and deployment models such as virtualization and cloud permeate datacenter environments, there is a need for some level of orchestration to keep power, cooling, space, servers, networking, and storage in equilibrium. Datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM) is meant to perform the orchestration for space, power, and cooling in the datacenter, respective of IT systems' changing requirements. This session will discuss the planning, management, and optimization software and services that constitute DCIM.

The Efficient Enterprise Solution and Secure Power

Moustapha Louni

Schneider Electric has been traditionally very strong in the energy and utility sectors. However, the enlarged scope of their secure power solutions, specific to these sectors, has not been presented before. This session will attempt to provide a complete overview of the datacenter and secure power solutions to the energy and utility verticals. From giving a global perspective on the energy challenges, to industry trends, the presentation will also delve into the solutions portfolio of Schneider Electric and illustrate the same through few local and international case studies.

Smart City & IT

Charbel Aoun, Schneider Electric

Improving the efficiency of urban infrastructures is essential to becoming a smarter city. Urban efficiency will deliver better public services, increase city attractiveness, drive its sustainability objectives and enhance its competitiveness on the regional or global stage.

But although technology is an obvious enabler of this transformation, better cities and happier communities have needs and aspirations that are not often expressed in technical terms.

We want to share the lessons learned from our 200+ smart city engagements across the world, highlighting the collaborative business model that supports such a massive transformation as well as the simple steps in the roadmap to urban sustainability.

Datacenter of the Future: Coming together of IT & Facilities

Ranjit Rajan, IDC

Today IT and facilities are simultaneously experiencing unprecedented pressure to keep the business up and running. Over the next few years, new deployment models such as cloud, outsourcing, hosting, and colocation, and also traditional IT will challenge the datacenter's typical mode of operation. Efficiency, availability, and cost continue to remain the key drivers for datacenter investments today. However, datacenter facilities and IT have not come together as they ought to - adding to the confusion and management complexity. The datacenter of the future will need to see the coming together of IT and facilities like never before. This session will describe the evolution of the datacenter of the future and the challenges and solutions to meet the goals of efficiency, cost and availability.

Dushyantha Goonawardhane, Schneider Electric

The traditional method of datacenter design and deployment is now beginning to change, and progressive organizations are realizing that modular facility modules will simplify the datacenter process, from concept through deployment, in a predictable time and cost-efficient manner. This presentation will discuss the trend and show models that validate the concepts.